- Over a billion has been lost to
crypto scams in the last two years.
And you might be thinking, yeah, yeah,
I'll never get scammed myself, though.
Think again, Bucko.
These scammers are getting way too smart, and I
don't want you to be the next victim.
It's plain and simple.
So let's look at how these crafty
little ****s run their business, and I might
even get scammed myself in the process.
So scammers have been coming up with creative
ways is to fool us for centuries.
I mean, in the past scammers had to do it to your face.
They constantly had to risk getting caught and
I don't know, having their hand cut off or something.
And I hate to say it was more
respectable then, but you get my point.
Today it's just some dude in
his bedroom taking a $1000 from you
while his mom makes lunch in the other room.
Only just now are these
people starting to get prosecuted.
But what's interesting is almost half of
all crypto scams start on social media.
So I decided to check things out
by checking my own profile.
And I know what you're thinking.
No, I don't just make a new account
every time I log into Instagram.
However, my grandma does do that
on Facebook and it's pretty cute.
I guess theoretically it's possible that in the infinite
universe there could be a Maxwell Mayhar
and Max_.Mahar, who just happened to look a lot like me
and have very similar names.
But before we get to the bottom of that, let's
first see how a crypto scam works in real life.
Imagine you're browsing social media.
You scroll past some thirst traps and Liverking, and
then you see an ad about making money online with crypto
and you're bored, so you click it
On this site, this company called BitXF offers you,
"asset security and easy money".
It looks like a legit site, but, you know
it sounds like a little bit too good to be true.
However, on the other hand, you've heard about
all these people making money with crypto,
so maybe there's something here.
You say, screw it, I'll deposit $10,
just see what happens.
Like, worst case scenario, I lose $10, I'll be fine.
But it's real.
The platform shows you're actually making profits.
Your $10 turned into $20 in just a few days.
Of course, your next thought is,
man, I should have put in more money.
Imagine if I put a $1000 in this thing I'd have $2000 right now.
So you deposit a bit more and a
few days later even more profits rolling.
Your confidence is building and so are your deposits.
Finally you want to pull out some of the money
that you've made, but
you're locked out of your account.
You get a message saying that
you violated money laundering laws.
There must be some kind of mistake,
you reach out to support.
And it's actually no big deal.
You just need to verify your information.
This is standard stuff.
So you send over a bunch of personal information in
order to secure the account and make a withdrawal.
That is, until the next week.
You see, your bank account has been drained.
All but $2.
Your life savings gone.
This is exactly what happened to Miles McQueary.
He started by harmlessly dipping a toe in
and ended up being a major crypto scam victim.
Miles invested in this website.
BitX financial.
- Were you actually making money on this platform?
- I assume it was, from what it
was showing that it was making money.
- Sure, there are red flags here, but
this is a very sophisticated scam. Think about it.
They actually built a crypto
exchange that showed investment returns.
And you know what?
Let's make a list of red flags to look out for.
The more of these you find,
the faster you should run away.
They promise huge returns with no downside or risk.
They're insistent and will push
you hard to join quickly.
Scammers have to move on to the next victim.
If you're not interested.
Their marketing probably has spelling mistakes in it
or details that are very unclear.
They make it look as though your money
is growing, at least for a while.
It's a classic ponzi tactic.
Then they make it impossible to
actually get your money out.
They'll often ask for more money or information.
If you try to make any withdrawals of your cash
and they're not regulated anywhere, and you only have maybe
a phone number and an email address to contact them.
Why do so many people fall for these scams?
Greed, naivete, being too trusting, not
taking the time to research.
Probably a mixture of these things.
I mean, we all could be tempted by easy
profits, but take a look at the points on
Now, I do need to give you one solid tip.
One of the simplest things you can do to avoid a scam,
is to search the site, followed by the word scam.
Most scams will have reviews from
other people who've gotten scammed.
Let's try it with BitXF.
That took maybe 6 seconds and
could save you your life savings.
Now, I wish that I could say that this is
as advanced as a scam gets, but it's not.
Imagine you built up a Hinge or Tinder profile,
you're putting yourself out on the market.
Now, most of your matches are garbage, as they always are.
You're sick of girls only wanting to
get into your pants and nothing else.
It's ridiculous and gross.
But finally you land a match and
you hit it off right away.
They have the same interests as you.
They want to talk about the political
and economic state of the world.
They even mention crypto.
Only problem is, they live pretty far away. Sucks.
But for the right one, you'll make it work.
Overall, it's going great.
A few weeks pass and you're getting closer and closer.
There's a real connection here.
She casually mentions how she made some
good money off crypto, and you're interested
in anything she has to say.
So you ask her more about it.
She's actually making a lot of money, it turns out,
so you ask for more details.
Eventually, she just offers to
make the investments for you.
I mean, she already knows how to do it, so why not?
You know her pretty well by now, and she's super smart.
So you make a small investment, and just
a short while later you're getting screenshots from
her of all the profits you've made. Holy shit.\
You invest more and more in just a couple of months.
You've got a girlfriend and money.
But of course you can guess how this ends.
Your girlfriend's fake, and so are the returns.
You are blinded by love and blood dry.
This is a cruel type of scam called Pig Butchering.
Long-term dating fraud.
And it works well.
The median loss is $10,000.
This is what happened to Nicole Hutchinson.
She met Hao on the dating app Hinge, and
over the course of a few months, she invested
and lost $390,000 to her fake boyfriend.
Let's set up a checklist for pig Butchering.
Step one: Win the confidence of the other person.
Blind them by love.
Step two find out details about them.
How much money do they have?
Step three: Drop into the conversation something about
crypto investing and say that you're an expert.
Step four: Give details about where to
send the money to make incredible returns, your wallet.
Step five: Repeat.
It's sad and it's disgusting.
Back to my Instagram search.
I decided to check out the alternate versions of me
just to double check if any of them were scammers.
They all work really hard to be me.
Snippets and screenshots of my
videos, even Instagram stories regularly.
By the way, my real Instagram is in the
description, so just make sure you follow that one.
Also, down there you'll find
my new membership site, Finova.
People are absolutely loving it, so just
make sure you grab a spot.
I finally settled on Max_.Mahar
He's all about making money and NFTs,
he seems pretty chill.
A lot of the fake mes have this link under their profile
that you need to follow if you want to make money.
Stay tuned because we need to
talk about these imposter scams.
It's been all over the news lately,
but it's actually been around forever.
I mean, this chick scam millions of dollars
by pretending to be Andrew Carnegie's daughter.
But look at this guy.
Patrick Bet-David is
a well known entrepreneur personality.
He was confused when he got an email saying
that he's conned someone out of $15,000 in Bitcoin.
It turns out that an impostor had been
making comments on his videos, pretending to be him,
and giving this WhatsApp link to these
series of weird ways to send scammers money.
He followed the trail and actually
got an imposter on the phone.
- So you work directly for Patrick Bet-David.
Are you the person that manages all his crypto account?
- Yeah, I'm not the only one.
- So what about my fake Instagram pages?
I followed the link, and it took
me to a PDF about NFT investments.
This counterfeit Max tells me I can easily find
undervalued NFTs and flip them for 100X profits.
Now, sure, NFT profits are real, but
100 X effortlessly?
Let's be real.
So, looking back at the scam checklist, we
can see that they're guaranteeing big returns.
But are they insistent?
Well, there's a WhatsApp number at the bottom,
so let's give it a try.
We're using my friend Dan's
WhatsApp just to be incognito.
But first, are there any mistakes or
vague details on the PDF itself?
There aren't many errors, but it's pretty low on
actual details on how the 100 X works.
Besides saying $1500 will get you some kind
of guide that will earn you massive profits.
What's funny is I searched for this guide on Google
and found what looks like the exact same guide with
a lot of the same images and text for $47.
These guys have no boundaries.
They just ripped off the details from other
sites and bumped up the price 30X.
And this could also explain the lack
of mistakes in the language used.
Now, the PDF doesn't state my name on it,
but the link is from a fake
profile with a modified version of my name.
So they actually claim to be me.
Here's the start of the conversation on WhatsApp.
The person immediately tried to hook us in with the
promise of big profits on Bitcoin mining and investment.
When we asked if he was affiliated to me,
he said he was.
In fact, he said he handles all my
social media, which is news to me.
I wanted to make a $1000 investment in
NFTs, but the fake Max told us that
nah, we're better off with Bitcoin and mining.
This could get me up to
$20,000 in just three short weeks.
He even told us it was guaranteed.
Then came the strange part.
He offered the chance to speak with me.
How could we refuse?
The scammer was patient and made us wait for
replies each time, like sometimes hours, to make it
seem like it was the real me, I guess.
But finally, we got to speak to me over text.
And I apparently also confirmed
that the investment was guaranteed.
Although, for some reason, I refused the chance
of a phone call with myself and was
in a big, big hurry to get away. I wonder why.